The north of the Ethralis continent was a cold and silent land. On the southern slopes of the majestic mountain range that dominated the region's north, the Northern High Peaks, stretched the dense and gloomy Northern Taigas, covering almost half the continent. In the depths of these dark, silent, and coniferous forests, lived the vampires.
They were a long-lived race, living in small, isolated groups composed of small families. Unlike the hurried and short lives of the other races on the continent, vampires lived for an average of 400 years. This long life had taught them to see the world through a different lens: slow, patient, and indifferent.
The most distinct features of the race were that they were albinos, with a chalk-white, pale skin color that allowed them to blend perfectly into the pale colors of the taiga. The only thing that stood in stark contrast to this deathly white skin was their red eyes, which glowed like two small embers in the forest's twilight.
This unique physiology came at a cost: Sunlight was an enemy to them. Though it did not directly burn them, the bright light hurt their eyes, bothered them, and caused them to see so poorly in daylight as to be almost blind. Therefore, they were the children of the night and the perpetual dimness offered by the taiga; they hunted their prey in the silent hours between sunset and dawn.
They led quiet lives. They hardly communicated with other races, or even with other vampire settlements in another corner of the forest. They lived in their own small territories, by their own ancient rules, ignoring the noisy chaos of the rest of the world.
This indifference was so deep that even the Dragon Lords, the once-absolute rulers, had seen this strange, pale race as insignificant. They hadn't even wasted their breath asking for their submission. The vampires were seen as vague, scattered, and insignificant shadows, unable to attract the attention of the mighty dragons, and were left to their own devices.
However, even in their eternal silence, the only constant is change itself. Though they did not notice it, the fabric of the world, Ferosia itself, was changing from its very roots.
That mana spread throughout all of Ferosia like an invisible radiation, leaking from the strange machines of the Sky Gods and their apocalyptic wars with the dragons. The very air began to crackle with energy. The realm's natural amount of mana increased exponentially over the years.
For most races, this was a boon; a divine key that enabled them to cast magic, like the legendary power of Rünin.
But for the vampires, this was not a key. It was a poison seeping into their isolated, delicate biology. This new, dense energy reacted with their nature and caused strange, horrific, irreversible mutations.
The race's calm metabolism collapsed. It was replaced by a new, burning desire that scorched their bones and minds. The vampire race began to crave something irrational, something they had never felt before: Blood. Not just to survive, but to soothe an existential pain. And this hunger was so blind that it did not care about the source of the blood; an animal, a stranger... or a family member.
Their realization of this change did not happen with a mass hysteria that encompassed the entire race at once. Because of the vampires' isolated lives, far from one another, the tragedy was seen in each village, one by one, as a private and terrible secret. The geographical distances between the tribes prevented the news of this new plague from spreading; each settlement was forced to live its own small hell, alone.
This horror sometimes revealed itself when a hunter, who had chased prey in the taiga all night, returned to his hut in the pale, gray light of dawn. What should have greeted him was not a warm fire and the voice of his family, but the metallic scent of blood seeping from the doorway and a deathly silence. And when he entered, it was to witness the lifeless bodies of his children, and his wife, standing over those bodies, growling, her eyes glowing with an unfamiliar redness...
Sometimes, this foul desire sprouted within a child. Killing their own mother and father in their sleep, in their beds, that safest of places, at their most vulnerable moment. Without any noise, any struggle, just with pure, instinctive savagery...
Or sometimes, even worse, it happened when several people in that small village succumbed to this madness, this unbearable hunger, at the same time, turning that collective tranquility into a mutual massacre in an instant. A mass destruction where everyone hunted everyone, where the screams were cut short quickly, and when the dawn broke, all that remained of that village were corpses scattered on the snow and cooling bodies...
After they took the hot blood they craved, after they sated that instinctive, burning hunger, the red fog that clouded their minds would dissipate. For the vampires whose madness subsided, their lives, from that moment on, turned into a seemingly endless tragedy.
When their eyes cleared again, the sight they saw was an unimaginable horror. When they realized to whom those bloody, mangled bodies belonged, the real torment began. They had killed their own loved ones, their friends, the spouses they shared their lives with, the children of their own blood. The weight of this act would crash down on their minds like a mountain in that moment.
In the "luckier" villages, where the madness had initially struck only one person, the survivors could not make sense of what they saw. They interpreted it not as a "disease" brought by the mana, but as an individual "madness" or "murder." The community, instead of lynching that shocked person, covered in blood, not understanding what they had done, branded them a murderer and contented themselves with exiling them to the depths of the forest, to their death.
This, however, was their greatest mistake.
They thought they had solved the problem by exiling that "murderer," that they had cast out the rotten apple among them. The rest of the village, while trying to heal from this trauma, was unaware that the same poison was circulating in their own veins. Until days or weeks later, when someone else's eyes turned red—perhaps someone who had stood at the forefront of those who sent the first murderer into exile...
With someone else also falling to this madness, only then did they understand the gravity of the situation, that this was not a matter of murder, but a plague affecting their entire race.
That is, if anyone survived long enough from that second outbreak to tell this truth...
Those who survived these massacres or tragic exiles were now suffering souls, left under the rubble of their own actions. They tried to continue their lives under a deep, melancholic veil of fog, in the shadow of those terrible memories, without harming anyone, and especially not each other. They withdrew to the remotest corners of the taiga; they lived in the shadows, fearing that terrible hunger that could be triggered again at any moment, hunting only animals to survive.
However, in this new, bleak, and isolated existence, they soon realized something.
They had inherited not only that burning hunger and tragedy, but also a new potential. They were much stronger than before; they could snap a thick tree branch with their bare hands, move more silently than a storm. And most importantly, they now perceived the world differently. They could now smell mana—that foreign energy which brought them this curse—not just as a poison, but like a scent.
The most horrific and ironic truth they discovered, however, was the dark connection between the two: With every drop of blood they drank, immediately following that momentary satiation, these new powers increased. The source of their curse was also the key to their potential salvation... or deeper corruption.